Movies on Mars

 Here's a little curiosity that I've mentioned before, but now with added evidence:

In the 1980 TV miniseries of The Martian Chronicles, there is a brief scene of people coming out of (what I assume to be) a cinema. Either side of the door is a rather amateurish poster with the title The Silver Locusts. The artwork on the poster is taken from... the UK paperback of The Silver Locusts, which was the original UK title for... The Martian Chronicles.

How meta is that? People in MC going to watch a film about themselves!

I noticed this in 1980, when the show was first aired on British TV. But this was before VCRs, and the appearance of the artwork was so fleeting as to be unprovable. The commercial DVD release allowed the image to be paused, but it was rather muddy.

But thanks to Bluray, we can now get a closer look. So here is the proof:

Silver Locusts posters as the crowd emerges from the cinema.

UK paperback, 1970s. Artwork by Peter Goodfellow.

When the miniseries was released, UK publisher Granada decided to cash in by re-issuing The Silver Locusts as The Martian Chronicles.

In the same sequence, there are some other posters on display, but I haven't been able to figure out what they are. They're probably completely fictional, but who knows? What are we looking at here? mtext? Invasion?

Bradbury films online

If you couldn't get to the opening night of Ray Bradbury: From Science to the Supernatural - or if you were there and want to see the films again - here is a handy collection of links to online versions of some of the films.

Icarus Montgolfier Wright
This is a different print to the one we screened, and lacks the Bradbury introduction (which was added c.1970).

And The Moon Be Still As Bright
From The Martian Chronicles.

The Burning Man
 From The Twilight Zone.

Marionettes, Inc.
From The Ray Bradbury Theater. Watch out for the Bradbury stand-in in the title sequence. (From the front, the legs and arms of "Ray" are significantly skinnier than the real Ray.)

The Life Work of Juan Diaz
From The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Another Jar...

After blogging about "The Jar" the other day, I remembered that there were at least two more media versions of "The Jar" in existence - one for Bradbury's own TV series, and one for his own radio series.

So I now offer a new review of the Ray Bradbury Theater version of "The Jar" - click here! Like all episodes of RBT, it was scripted by Bradbury himself. It's better than the revived Hitchcock version from 1986, but not as good as the original Hitchcock version from 1964.

The radio version, for Tales of the Bizarre, will be reviewed at a later date.

The Jar...and other ways to be useful after death...

Good evening.

Somehow that seems the only appropriate way of introducing a blog post that mentions Alfred Hitchcock's TV series.

As I have posted before, Ray Bradbury did a lot of work on Hitch's TV shows, scripting several episodes of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I now have reviews of the Hour episodes on my site: here you can read about "The Life Work of Juan Diaz" and "The Jar" - which, according to director Norman Lloyd, was Hitchcock's favourite episode of the series. It also earned an Emmy award for dramatist James Bridges, who would later write and direct The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome and Bright Lights, Big City.

Both of these Hour episodes involve characters who provide spectator sports, long after their demise. (Imagine Hitchcock saying it.)

I have also reviewed the less than inspiring 1980s remake of "The Jar". Here you can read about Tim Burton's early career effort for the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Yes, the one hosted by a fuzzily colorised Hitch.)

I also have a sidebar story on the origins of "The Jar", and a link to Norman Lloyd discussing the Bradbury episodes.

The Gift

"The Gift" is one of Ray Bradbury's shortest short stories, and one of the few Bradbury stories with a Christmas theme (Halloween will always be Bradbury's holiday of choice).

The story first appeared in 1952 in Esquire magazine, where it was accompanied by a magnificent painting by Ren Wicks (left).

A few years later, Bradbury took the story's central premise and placed it within a completely different narrative and setting, adapting it to the USAF-inspired TV series Steve Canyon (itself based on the comic strip by Milt Caniff).

The long-unseen episodes of that series are being gradually released on DVD, in an excellent piece of restoration work. Bradbury's episode is now on release (all 25 minutes of it) in Steve Canyon on TV Volume 2.

You can read my full review of the episode here.

Finished reading the review? Good. Now you can go and order the DVD! Click on the image below:

Unchanged Habits

The Ventura Country Reporter has just published a new interview with Bradbury, which shows his writing habits to be unchanged, despite his eighty-eight years. Mind you, you can't believe everything you read: this article claims that Bradbury still travels the world giving lectures. Not quite. He doesn't venture beyond Southern California these days, because of his health. Anyway, read the interview here.

Update: the New York Times features a similar (but better written, more quirky, more fun) article in its 19th June issue. I am told this was a page one story!




Here's a nice idea - and one I have used with my own Video & Film Production students on occasion: making a trailer for a book!

Digital Book Talk is a literacy scheme from the University of Central Florida. It has synopses and film trailers for lots of books. One such is this neat trailer for Fahrenheit 451, and another for The Martian Chronicles.




The Steve Canyon volume 2 DVD is now on release. This is the second collection of episodes from an old TV series. The significance for the Bradbury fan is that this volume includes the episode that Bradbury scripted, a Christmas tale called "The Gift".

Reviews of the DVD can be found at DVD Talk and Comic Mix.

Bradbury in...Belgium!

I'm recently returned from Belgium, where I presented a paper at the "Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelisation" conference. My paper, entitled "Adaptive Behaviours", was another in my series exploring ways in which Bradbury's prose fictions adapt to other media. This time I focused on the short story "A Sound of Thunder" and discussed key adaptations for TV and film, as well as various graphic adaptations. It was an elaboration of some ideas I first considered in this post.

Also presenting at the conference was Aristea Chryssohou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who did an excellent analysis of Francois Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451.

There were additional delights of being in Belgium, one of which was the opportunity to visit the iconic Atomium. Although this has no direct connection to Bradbury, there are certain thematic connections, which I hope to blog about soon.

Found on the Web

Found on the web:


This interesting description of the Ray Bradbury Theatre episode "The Town Where No One Got Off, which reveals that famed Disney animator Ward Kimball makes a cameo appearance in the episode prologue. This came as news to me! My own review of the episode, incidentally, can be found here.




This interesting interview with artist John Randall York. John frequents the official Bradbury message board, and has been known to post his Bradbury-inspired artwork on the board.

Bradbury Rare TV

A very rare piece of television created by Ray Bradbury has been announced for DVD release.

In the 1950s, Bradbury scripted a single episode of Steve Canyon, a series based on the comic strip created by Milton Caniff. Now, by arrangement with the Caniff estate, a second DVD collection of episodes is to be released - including Bradbury's episode, entitled "The Gift".

For my (rather brief) page on Steve Canyon, click here.

For the official news of the release, click here.

The Veldt: New Radio Adaptation

"I wrote The Veldt because my subconscious knew more about children than has often been told." Ray Bradbury wrote these words in his introduction to his stage play version of his classic story.

"The Veldt" tells the story of a futuristic nursery, where children are kept occupied by a virtual reality environment, which can conjure up any world they can imagine. The children's parents ultimately pay the price for offloading childcare responsbilities onto a machine.

Bradbury seems to have concocted this tale primarily as an observation on the potential for "evil" inherent in children. As such it is a companion piece to "Zero Hour", "The Small Assassin" and "The Playground". In all of these tales, children conspire to do bad things.

"The Veldt" has remained one of Bradbury's most popular stories, and has been adapted for radio, television and film many times. Its popularity back in the 1950s was giving a huge helping hand by the radio adaptations. These, no doubt, came about in part because Bradbury's nursery is an obvious analogy for the then new - and, to radio, threatening - medium of television.

Bradbury has little interest in technology, and probably didn't care that his story was criticised for technological implausibility. However, the story has been used many times over the years as an exemplar of virtual reality, and today's technology (particularly in interactive media) seems to have at last caught up with Bradbury's once implausible concept.

A "modernised" version of Bradbury's story has just been produced by BBC radio. It builds in some of our modern day concerns about how children waste/spend their time. In my view, little modernisation is really necessary, since Bradbury got the issues spot on in the original story. However, playwright Mike Walker has created a vibrant new version on the story. And anyway, I am always pleased to encounter a new dramatisation of a Bradbury story.

If you are quick, you can catch the play via the BBC's "Listen Again" feature by clicking here. The link will be valid until 28th May, after which the BBC will replace it with a different play.

Adaptations

I'm currently researching adaptations of three Bradbury stories: "Mars is Heaven!", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt". It's for a paper I'm preparing to deliver at a conference in July.

I've chosen these particular stories because they seem to be recurringly popular, with repeated adaptations for radio and television.

"Mars is Heaven" is an interesting case because Bradbury himself has adapted it on more than one occasion. The original short story appeared in Planet Stories in 1948. Bradbury then converted it into "The Third Expedition", a chapter of his novelised story cycle The Martian Chronicles. In the 1960s he wrote the first of several screenplays of the Chronicles, and in the 1970s the stage play version. And in the 1980s he wrote a teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater.

The story is unusual, in that it combines the small-town USA sensibilities of some of his other work (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes) with a Martian setting.

Listening to various radio adaptations, I have been intrigued that Ernest Kinoy's 1950s Dimension X/X Minus One script uses a rooster as the first signifier that the Earthmen might still be on Earth rather than on Mars. This element isn't present in Bradbury's short story, nor in The Martian Chronicles. However, in Bradbury's 1980s teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater there's that rooster again. Has Bradbury borrowed from Kinoy? Or was Kinoy working from a different draft of Bradbury's story?

"The Burning Man"

One of the best Bradbury adaptations in the visual media was a modest entry in the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. "The Burning Man" is only eleven minutes long, and is based on Bradbury's short story of the same name. The writer and director of the adaptation was J.D.Feigelson.

Feigelson took Bradbury's story, looked at the central metaphors - the idea of evil being perpetually reborn, like locusts that return every seventeen years; and the idea that we all go a little crazy in the heat - and ran with them. This is by far the best way to capture the spirit of Bradbury; instead of slavishly keeping the plot but losing the imagery, you cling to the imagery and let the plot slide where necessary.

As it happens, Feigelson made very few changes to the story, just enough to vary the pace and, more importantly, to emphasise the drama in the dialogue.

Bradbury's story may be flawed (is it locusts that rise up out of the earth, or is it cicadas?), but Feigelson has captured the look and the feel of Bradbury's original. It has marvellous performances, particularly from Roberts Blossom as the crazy old guy.

"The Burning Man" features characters called Aunt Neva and Doug (probably Douglas Spaulding, although this isn't specified). Both names are familiar from other Bradbury stories. Bradbury really did have an aunt called Neva - there is a picture in Nard's gallery ("Ray Bradbury Personal Photos #2").